idiots

Joe Biden stumbled out of his call-center cubicle yesterday and decided to do something idiotic again. What did the human embarrassment do this time? Oh, just attack some low-paid government biologists for working really hard on an endangered species website that costs all of $125 a year — that’s a hundred-and-twenty-five dollars. Hmm, that sounds a little bit like a number Joe Biden loves to spend, but you need to add nine zeroes, because that’s what this administration spends killing American troops and robot-bombing random villagers in Afghanistan, every year: $125 billion. But spending .000000001% of that — about the price of the average household’s monthly cell-phone bill — to maintain a website about the endangered state animal of California and Nevada, the beloved desert tortoise, now that’s something Joe Biden doesn’t care for at all. He sent an email about this, to everyone, to show what a jabbering imbecile he is.

(Yes, this is your former editor. Sorry, I had to come out of retirement for a few minutes, to deal with this.)

While everything from kids’ school lunches to Medicare is chipped away by the false crisis of “The Deficit,” the never-ending wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the other four or five Muslim countries currently being million-dollar-bombed around the clock never seem to run out of American Money. Afghanistan is costing $125 billion per year, if you believe the Pentagon’s own numbers, which not even the Pentagon believes.

But Joe Biden doesn’t care about that. He’s too busy signing off on failed attempts at cutesy emails full of his staffers’ attempts at mean-spirited humor — jabs directed at low-paid U.S. biologists who are using their expensive college educations to protect America’s natural resources. As if the scientists who work for their nation’s government didn’t get enough abuse from the Bush administration over the last decade, now they’ve got to deal with Joe Biden mocking them for doing their jobs on a shoestring budget?

Did you LOL at Biden’s stupid jab? Of course not. But we bet you felt something. Disgust, probably.

Thanks to Wonkette operative “Jerry,” we know exactly how much the website in question costs: $125 a year, plus a few hours of a hard-working scientist’s extra, unpaid time. You know, so that there might be some accurate information online about a threatened species — a species that has been here in America for millions of years, yet has declined by about 90% just in the last three decades.

With the Obama Administration’s fast-tracking of solar farms in environmentally critical western wilderness, the desert tortoise population in the American deserts is literally being dug up by bulldozers right now, because the orders from this administration have been to ignore environmental concerns. (Solar power is good and necessary and the West has no lack of “disturbed land” for all the renewable energy this country could ever need, but building hundred-mile-wide power plants atop unspoiled wilderness is moronic.)

Not that it will change this administration’s terrible environmental record, but Joe Biden owes a personal apology to the government biologists who maintain that very useful website. And then he should go back to Delaware and shut his ignorant mouth for good. [BizJournals/AFP/DesertTortoise.gov]

1. That's a brilliant idea (emergency lobotomies for when it all gets to be too much).

2. It's my understanding that a lobotomy does not actually require a drill, but rather a single, well-placed strike from an ice pick.

DaRooster

Them shoes give good tongue.

One_who_wanders

OK this is silly but it is not as scary as all the commentators saying ol' crazy eyes won last night's debate. OMG CNN has a Tea Party group the are interviewing about the debate and they loved her and the Newt. Time to get back under the bed. Hello dust bunnies.

tihond

He would have been OK with it if it was a website about turtle fences.

That moniker suggests that Downfister is Icelandic (a la "Gudmundsdottir" and whatnot), and Iceland is cool (if broke), and should not be in any way associated with dumb Amurrican cheeto-stained assholes.

This reminds me of Sarah Palin burping out her snark about fruit fly research.

Boojum_Reborn

She thought Drosophila Melanogaster Palin sounded too black.

Sparky_McGruff

Oh, Sarah, Sarah… That particular incident still leaves me with a special feeling of despair.

I remember her belching out her snark about how we were spending money to study "Fruit flies in France". As if the government were spending her hard grifted cash on encouraging the gay insect lifestyle..

Then I actually bothered to look up what she was talking about. A small outpost of the USDA, in the agricultural region of France, that was looking at the agricultural pests in the region, and working on finding ways to keep European bugs from entering the US, and how to deal with them if they make it over.

Which is simply foolish, because we never have a problem with imported pests, like fire ants, asian stink bugs, the "mediteranean fruit fly", africanized honey bees, etc. We need to spend our money to pay Halliburton to electrify the showers in army barracks.

riverside68

If you spent time in the Northeast it is hard to ignore Dutch Elm Disease, which is wiping out the Elm trees. Very sad.

Hey, how about those Brown Marmorated Stink Bugs which are all over the Northeast? I'd be happy to spend $125 billion to wipe those fuckers off the face of the earth instead of bombing the Brownz in Afghanistan.

finallyhappy

Why ,you speciest!!!

DemmeFatale

It reminds me of Piyush and the volcano thing.
WTF Biden!?

(BTW: call center cubicle= snark gold.)

PsycWench

Joe, Joe, Joe. I want to like you, I really do, but you're making it very difficult.

Goonemeritus

Laugh it up but if he does it a billion times he will free up funds to bomb France in a revenue neutral way

freakishlywrong

The Gang of Five idiots. Fer Chrissakes, the conversation in this country really needs to change. You've got pundits on every fucking "news" outlet asking not if, but how much we need to cut our safety nets. It's "raise the retirement age, or the Ryan Plan"? All the time. How about we need to start investing in getting people back to fucking work and taxing the lazy rich. Or eating them. And, seriously assholes, we're fed up with the shiny distraction that is Weiner's Weiner.

I LOVE tortoises. They make such lovely soup. And provide their own bowl for the slurping.

Terry

The science bashing done by politicians on both sides makes me crazy. They take use their lack of understanding as evidence that a project is useless or wasteful. I really don't know when ignorance became such a virture.

Do you think it is a side effect from Biden's personal experience with reforestation?

flamingpdog

I think they astroturfed his head. Real trees don't survive without a nutritive base to sink their roots into.

Terry

Applauding whole heartedly.

Right now, a freakishly stupid minority of voters is steering the national direction.

Crank_Tango

Hmm. the "greatest country on earth" and "Last superpower" is hard up for 125 bucks? cool.

MissusBarry

Just like all the poorz living in said country.

flamingpdog

I've read that hobos standing at I-25 interchange off-ramps in Denver can make 60 dollars a day with a sign and their hands out. Mebbe we can put Old Joe to work for a couple of days on a 495 off-ramp to make up the difference.

Mort_Sinclair

How many times in Joe's lifetime do you think he has uttered this question: "Huh? Whut? WHUT?? Whut'd I say?"

I tried to call the Veep's office to complain, but a man with a voice that sounded a lot like Mr. Biden only answered "Joe's Bar and Grill," and then I heard muffled giggling as he hung up the phone. I'll try again tomorrow.

riverside68

Ken, Ken, Ken, calm down. It is all going according to the Plan*:

Pull USA into Afganistan and bankrupt it so it can't afford to continue to occupy the Middle East.

Don't you want an end to the US empire Ken? Well it is happening before your very eyes.

Smile, put on a happy face! Sure it is going to get difficult here, but it is the process whereby the rest of the world is freed up of US military dominance. If you are a global citizen, you should be happy and encourage Joe to save the turtles while the empire crashes.

*Osama bin Laden's of course

Respitetini

Wow. Imagine having a Democrat in the White House. We'd never have an administration that said things like that.

So thanks for coming out of retirement Ken so you could argue in favor of Sharia Law and letting Obama fuck Grandma with Weiner's dick or some such. At least Jr. seems to love America.

MissusBarry

I wonder how much the staffer was paid in the course of researching and writing. Whether or not it rises to the whopping $125 mark, I am in favor of a budget cut here.

auntfancy

Thanks for coming out to post this. I got the same damn email and was like wtf? As a CIO, I was cracking up that they were bitching about a website costing a lot of money. And his snide little comment about not being able to afford an individual website for every member of the animal kingdom…..hum guess these are the type of goons that would have berated Jefferson for sending out Lewis and Clark. Fuck your flora and fauna reports, we gots French and Injuns to kill. Fuck you to Library of Congress, why do we need books for all these facts, fuck em.

V572 [SSAN]

Sorry all you DTs at Twentynine Palms Stumps and Fort Irwin: the Marine Corps and Army M1A2 Abrams tanks are just gonna have to crunch you up like they always did if they don't know where you are. It's just collateral damage from our never-ending preparedness to defeat the Soviet forces when the come roaring through the Fulda Gap from East Germa….

"The humble Desert Tortoise, Gopherus agassizii, is the state reptile (did you know your tax dollars were paying for a state reptile?!) of California and Nevada."

Does Delaware have a state reptile? If not, I has an idea …

CrankyLttlCamperette

I thought the state reptile of Delaware was the credit card industry?

ttommyunger

Like you, I got Joe's email. I gave it a glance with the same enthusiasm I give all of Joe's utterances and promptly deleted it. Being penny-wise and pound foolish is the name of the game in DC. Face it, Joe spent fucking thousands on hair plugs and still has a bald spot the size of Arizona and this is the guy we want looking to cut wasteful spending? He, like most in power today, would have to be dead to be more out of touch with middle and lower class Americans.

a species that has been here in America for millions of years, yet has declined by about 90% just in the last three decades.

One of the biggest threats to the tortoises has been the Central Arizona Project. These canals siphon water from the colorado river to the major population centers in the Arizona deserts. They're all open air, which means they evaporate nearly as much as they actually transport……and they were built right through the middle of prime tortoise real estate. Every year, some of the horny poor bastards wake up in spring and go look for other tortoises to fuck……and plop. They fall in the canals and drown. CAP engineers have tried putting up small tortoise fuck bridges so that they can avoid drowning, but just try and explain that to horny little reptiles. All of this is appropos of nothing i suppose, except to say that anyone who bitches about a web page to these dedicated little guys and gals who we are killing off in droves for our water can go jump in a canal and drown.

Mort_Sinclair

None taken. It's not even my name. Mort Sinclair is the communist Catskill's comedian voiced by Jon Stewart on Stephen Colbert's audio version of I Am America and (So Can You!)

ttommyunger

Good news all the way around, thanks for the info.

Mort_Sinclair

Indeed. If I were named Mort, I'd have to set my hair on fire.

ttommyunger

No shit!

Lascauxcaveman

But you still wouldn't be able to sing like David Byrne.

AJWjr.

Of all the critters I get at my undisclosed desert compound (OK, Charleston View–look it up), the Desert Tortoise is the least likely to try to kill me, and therefore worthy of protection. I hope to fuck I never see Joebiden's motorcade out here…

HateMachine

If you do ever see Joe's motorcade, get to high ground, preferably behind several brick walls and spike strips.

If you don't ever see Joe's motorcade, it's probably coming up behind you right now, to run you over.

crybabyboehner

A Fable for Our Times: The Hairbrain and the Tortoise

In our beloved Southern states, the wonderful gopher tortoise is also endangered, one of the main reasons being that rattlesnakes like to hang out in their burrows, and stupid rednecks like to go out and pour gasoline down the hole to drive the snakes out so they can kill 'em. The tortoises are collateral damage, kind of like those kids in Afghanistan

Hell yes, fucking this. What happens if the bulk of the national electorate can't tell the difference between the Democrats and Republicans? If it all looks the same to a voter, that voter will just stay home. And leaves which group still headed to the polls?

Teabaggers.

HateMachine

In this case, we hate Biden for being a jackass, but are just kind of annoyed at Barry for saddling us with him.

DarwinianDemon

I read this and thought "This sounds like Ken Layne" because only Ken Layne can write that the Obama Administration is as bad as the Bush Administration on the environment in the same post that says the Obama Administration is building solar farms or quote Babbit as "BASHING" when the same article says this: "Mr. Babbitt said Mr. Obama still represented “the best, and likely only, hope for meaningful progress"

mrbubb

Fucking Obama needs a kick to the groin. Where the hell is the dude's head at?

ttommyunger

Works for me.

Negropolis

I read through that totally hoping to see Biden say something terribly horrible, and all I could muster was a "meh". Considering the shit he's said in the past, this is something a normal person reading through and email might have missed entirely, or more likely, would have simply rolled their eyes at his regular idiocy. I like tortoises as much as the next guy, but this was a reach.

You ever heard that thing about picking wise battles? Of Joe's many offenses, light condescension of Gopherus agassizii does not rank high on my lists of offenses, at all.

By extension, of course, this is yet more evidence of the presidents moral bankruptcy.

This is what good governance is all about. Grandstanding over a-buck-fifty in the morning, going to a thousand-dollar-a-head fundraiser in the evening, rounding it all off with a "What Broken Economy?" press conference before bed-time. And Repeat.